NYU Law begins 2012-13 academic year with five new permanent faculty members

Five new permanent faculty members have joined the Law School, deepening the institution’s expertise in the areas of law and economics, tax policy, Islamic law, intellectual property and constitutional law. The appointments of Jeanne Fromer, Intisar Rabb, Adam Samaha, Alan Sykes, and David Kamin, bring the Law School’s permanent faculty to a total of 110 professors.

Jeanne Fromer, an intellectual property scholar specializing in unified theories of patent and copyright law and a Spring 2012 visiting professor at NYU Law, joined the Law School from Fordham University School of Law, where she was an associate professor. She uses social science research on creativity and cognition to inform her work on how IP law can create incentive for innovation. Fromer is a recipient of an inaugural Young Scholars Medal from the American Law Institute in 2011, and has presented her work twice at the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum. She was an IP associate at Hale and Dorr, a fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project, and a 2006-07 NYU Law Alexander Fellow. Fromer clerked for Judge Robert D. Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court. She received a B.A. in computer science summa cum laude from Columbia University’s Barnard College; an S.M. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was the articles and commentaries editor of the Harvard Law Review and the editor and symposium articles coordinator of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.

Adam Samaha, professor of law, joined NYU Law from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a professor of law, teaching in the areas of constitutional law, constitutional theory, and procedure. Samaha’s research interests lie in constitutional law and theory, along with the role of courts in society, and his recent scholarship includes the phenomenon of tie-breaking in law, the use of randomization in adjudication, the “dead hand” problem in constitutional law, and the predicted effect of Second Amendment litigation on gun control policy. Samaha received the Graduating Students Award for Teaching Excellence at Chicago in 2007. He joined the University of Chicago Law School faculty in 2004, and was a visiting professor at NYU Law in the fall of 2010. He clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court during its 1998-1999 term, and was previously part of the tobacco litigation team at Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, which achieved a multibillion-dollar settlement in 1998. After graduating from Bowdoin College with highest honors in 1992, Samaha earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1996, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and was awarded the Fay Diploma.

A leading figure in the field of law and economics, Alan Sykes joins the Law School from Stanford Law School, where he was the James and Patricia Kowal Professor of Law and director of the Master’s Program in International Economic Law, Business and Policy. Sykes has produced prodigious scholarship on international trade, antitrust, insurance, contracts, tort law, and vicarious and entity liability. His recent work has addressed international trade regimes while developing and applying economic models at the vanguard of trade economics. Sykes is the co-author, with the University of Chicago Law School’s Eric Posner, of the forthcoming book Economic Foundations of International Law, and has also co-authored The Genesis of the GATT (2008) and a leading international trade casebook. He is an editor of both the Journal of International Economic Law and the American Journal of International Law, a Reporter for the ALI Project on Principles of Trade Law, and a former co-editor of both the Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Law & Economics. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2006, Sykes had been a University of Chicago Law School professor for 20 years, and also worked as an associate at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C. He received a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University. Sykes was a visiting professor at NYU Law in Fall 1996.

Intisar Rabb is an associate professor of law and of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at the NYU School of Law and the NYU Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Department. She previously served as a member of the law faculty at Boston College Law School, where she taught criminal law, legislation and theories of statutory interpretation, and comparative Islamic law and legal history. She also served as a law clerk for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Rabb was selected to give the James A. Thomas lecture at the Yale Law School for the 2012-2013 academic year, and in 2011 was awarded a Fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. In 2010, she was named a Carnegie Scholar for research on issues of contemporary Islamic law reform through processes of “internal critique.” Rabb has published on Islamic law in historical and modern contexts, and is currently working on a book called The Burden and Benefit of Doubt: Legal Maxims in Islamic Law. She received a B.A. from Georgetown University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. She has conducted research in Egypt, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.

David Kamin ’09, formerly special assistant to the president for economic policy, coordinating budget and tax policy for the Obama administration, joined the Law School as an assistant professor of law. Kamin’s research and teaching interests are in the areas of federal taxation, federal budget law and policy, state and local taxation, and administrative law. After graduating from NYU Law, Kamin worked as special assistant, and adviser to Peter Orszag, director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, helping to formulate policy for President Obama’s first two budgets. At NYU Law, Kamin was inducted into the Order of the Coif, and received several awards at commencement, including the Butler Memorial Award and the Paul D. Kaufman Award for most outstanding Note, “What Is a Progressive Tax Change? Unmasking Hidden Values in Distributional Debates,” in the 2008 New York University Law Review. Kamin was a Furman Academic Scholar as well as a Lederman/Milbank Fellow in Law, Economics, and Business.